Competition to name the ugliest piece of political language to emerge over the past decade has been fierce. In more than one sense, the Blair-Brown years have not been pretty. The wholesale abuse of English in matters of peace, war, economics and social policy would have had the grizzled shade of George Orwell spinning gently in his grave muttering: "Told you so."

My own nomination would have nothing to do with Iraq, rich field for historians of debauched usage though that has become. I would not waste too much time drawing parallels between Gordon Brown's invocations of prudence and Northern Rock. Tony Blair's artifice in describing the cash nexus in terms of the honours system was simply too shameless to be worth the bother.

No, let's aim low. Really low. Truly bad political language is only interesting, after all, when something egregious and apparently minor reveals a larger truth. For that, for my money, you have to go back a decade. How about Blair's Babes? Remember them?

Given the diminishing number of women in Mr Brown's cabinet, they seem to have slipped his mind. Given that Mr Blair, to my knowledge, never got around to disowning the charmless description as beneath contempt, it probably counts as one of the many things he managed to forget. Yet was it only 10 years ago that a fairly stunning insult - and a whopping indictment of Westminster politics - passed with little or no criticism?

Babes. It does not refer to infants, though the infantilising effect is obvious. Since I don't subscribe to lads' mags - another demographic with a title to envy - I can't be certain of the alternative definition. I'm pretty sure, though, that none of the Labour women returned in 1997 and in later years conceived her life's work in terms of lingerie and full-colour cover spreads.

Someone thought the phrase was nicely alliterative, nevertheless, with the possessive sense in favour of Mr Blair, and a patronising note - a babe clearly being the opposite of "too old" - granted to the girlies. Most of them turned out for a group portrait with the leader in any case, as I remember, no doubt telling themselves that they symbolised increased representation for women. That's not how the tabloids saw it. "Blair's Babes" passed, for a while, into the language, and then into history.

This paragraph ought to explain why that matters. It occurs to me, however, that if you really need the explanation I don't have the space to provide the service. Let's just say, at minimum, that the right of women to distinguish themselves in government, or to waste everyone's time as talentless party hacks, is a piece too long missing from the democratic jigsaw.

With hindsight, a civilised society would have paid no attention to the 1997 Westminster influx as a distinct group, beyond noting that a little progress had been made. The problem of all-women shortlists would not have been resolved. Wage discrimination, still thriving, would not have been brought to an end. But the idea that women could be in parliament in numbers would have attracted no comment, certainly no jokes. Back in the real world, fat chance.

That was then, though. Things are different in the 21st century, are they not? As a columnist hates to say, yes and no. I'm prepared to bet that if Mr Brown shuffled his cabinet tomorrow and awarded 70% of the seats around the table to women, headlines would follow. Not because of the abilities or otherwise of the women involved. Not because a judgment had been passed on the talents or otherwise of Labour men. The headlines would be generated simply because such things never, ever happen in British political life.

Except, of course, when they do. As signs of political maturity go, Wendy Alexander's choices for a shadow Scottish cabinet fit few of the usual categories. They are not purely ideological. They are not, I think, intended as gestures towards positive discrimination. The effect of filling seven out of 10 shadow jobs with women is altogether more remarkable: there has been no effect. No comment, positive or negative. No outbreak of discussions over appropriate gender balance. Not even a wry or rueful man wondering how Labour women, a parliamentary minority, can wind up with a majority of the top posts.

Instead - I may be a lost cause socially, but I find this oddly refreshing - there have been reports of the usual Labour faction fights. We hear that Ms Alexander is "under fire" for overlooking this or that person. We are told that allies of her predecessor have "lost out" and are disgruntled. "Friends" of the dispossessed are already speaking ill, it is said, of the new leadership. But no-one is discussing gender. It is not - so far, so good - an issue.

That being the case, I should probably refrain from talking about the fact that no-one is talking. It would make sense. But when a formerly vexed issue becomes a non-issue in politics, something interesting is going on.

Scottish Labour's problems will not be solved simply because its parliamentary leadership is now dominated by women. Jack McConnell did not get into bother at the previous elections just because he was a man. Labour women are as capable of misreading public rejection as anyone, and of ploughing on with shop-soiled Blair-Brownism.

The significant thing, I think, has to do with the way devolved politics has opened up political spaces in a manner that seems to be beyond Westminster. We have already witnessed the fascinating effects of a semi-proportional electoral system. We are experiencing the strange, uncertain but tantalising world of minority government in a multi-party parliament. We take it for granted, irrespective of opinion, that Scotland's relationship with the United Kingdom will continue to be a fact of political life for all parties. Now Ms Alexander, as the jargon goes, ticks another box. Her new team will face an SNP government that already grants significant responsibility, without fuss or nicknames, to women. They can say what they like about Holyrood (and God knows they do) but progress towards a properly democratic parliament is happening almost by default. Which is to say that no-one is arguing, carping or making cheap jokes.

Two of the four main parties are led by women. Compare that with Westminster. No-one here thinks it odd in the slightest that Ms Alexander should make the choices she has made. Compare that with Westminster. Things that happen without a voice being raised in Edinburgh are still thought impossible in Westminster. Contrast and compare.

We should not, I grant, get too carried away. There are still plenty of men on the Scottish Labour back benches who will be muttering into their spritzers this week and mourning the bad old days. Politics is still conceived as a male occupation and the 81-year-old pictured with Gordon Brown in Downing Street last week is a reminder, still, that a woman can be just as disastrous in office as any man.

That's not the point. The point has to do with the franchise, and with universal suffrage, and with reaching a stage in the affairs of a society at which some things are simply taken for granted. It's coming.